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BY MOST measures, this year's gathering of the Screen
Producers Association of Australia should have meant fireworks. In
stark contrast to the television side of the business, film has
seen much better days.

Box office share of home-grown films is the lowest since records
began 30 years ago  less than 1% so far this year. Our films
are not finding audiences, domestically or abroad. A new funding
regime is being bedded down amid outcries that emerging filmmakers
will be shut out, symptom of an industry too long controlled by
baby boomers with outdated ideas and a weak grasp on how the market
and audiences have evolved.

And did we mention a newfangled central agency, Screen
Australia, whose widely respected chief executive, New Zealander Dr
Ruth Harley, is yet to start in the job?

SPAA's president, the forthright and uncensored producer Antony
Ginnane, lobbed the first broadside.

Today's "dark, depressing, bleak pieces are the equivalent of
ethnic cleansing", he said in his opening address to the annual
conference, held on the Gold Coast this week. If most Australian
films of the past 24 months were premiered on a plane, he went on
to say, "people would be walking out in the first 20 minutes".

His missive was widely reported in the national media, packaged
as a blanket reminder of the industry's apparent demise and
implicitly questioning the value of its public subsidy.

Efficiency and the hunt for success underpin the remit of Screen
Australia and the new funding model it will oversee and
administer.

The agency's mission is to develop a successful and sustainable
film industry that will engage audiences and shift from the
suitcase-producer model of the past to one where a handful of
"mini-studios" can bring together the elements of project
development  financing, distribution and marketing  and
meld them into thriving production entities along the lines, if not
the scale, of England's Working Title.

Those entities will be supported by a generous enterprise
program, which will provide up to $500,000 a year for three years.
Screen Australia will pour slightly less than half its total
allocation for project development into this program. It will also
administer the new producer offset, the principal mechanism through
which Australian films will be financed. The offset will allow
producers to claim a 40% rebate on production costs (as the rebate
applies to certain expenses only, its effective worth is between 30
and 35%, depending on whom one asks).

The rebate applies to productions with a budget of $1 million
and more but SPAA is lobbying to have it reduced for lower-budget
films.

Project-by-project development funds will also be available, but
the emphasis will be on experienced producers and writer-directors.
The latter must have at least three theatrically released features
under their belt or a feature that has screened at one of four
elite international film festivals.

Some sections of the industry are particularly concerned by the
removal of direct funding of short films. The former development
agency, the Australian Film Commission, provided $900,000 annually
for up to eight industry-standard short dramas and animations. Such
films give many of the industry's best and brightest their leg-up,
after which they can proceed into features.

Screen Australia says shorts will continue to be funded, but
through state agencies and screen resource organisations. Exactly
where the money will come from remains unclear.

This omission, coupled with the weight given to applicants with
track records, has galvanised "emerging filmmakers" to have the
proposed guidelines amended.

Eva Orner, the Melbourne-born, US-based documentary maker who
shared an Oscar this year for Taxi to the Dark Side, said
that under the new regime a clutch of baby boomers would move from
one seat to another.

Screen Australia is unapologetic. At a series of national
consultation meetings, executive Fiona Cameron said that finite
resources meant the agency could not be "all things to all people".
Rather than spreading its limited funds too thinly, Screen
Australia intended to target "fewer projects to increase the
quality of outcomes", Cameron said.

The changes reflect a wider shift. The short-film debate, says
an insider, "has become the pointy end of a larger debate about the
role of a screen agency".

Screen Australia deputy chairman Ian Robertson is unambiguous on
that score. He told a session at SPAA that the agency would not be
in the business of micro-managing projects, scrutinising budgets
or, "God forbid, reading scripts".

As Bryce Menzies, an experienced producer whose credits include
Malcolm, Noise and Ten Canoes sees it, the
former AFC was too costly for government. With Screen Australia,
the Government has found a way to outsource the arduous task of
dealing with the tyre-kickers.

"Everyone is a scriptwriter these days," he says, estimating
that he receives seven scripts a week. He says most aspiring
filmmakers will have no greater chance now than they did in the
past.

But the producer offset, he says, has the advantage of being
open to everyone  much like in the days of tax concessions,
when filmmakers who were turned down or unable even to get a
look-in at the funding agencies could go out on their own. The
offset means anyone with cashed-up "friends, family or fools" on
their side can invest in a film and get a return, he says.

Melbourne producer Daniel Scharf says the debate about shorts
and emerging filmmakers is a furphy.

"The technology has changed in the past 20 years and we have to
embrace it. I think it's a terrific opportunity to take the
creative paths out of the bureaucracy. These programs that involve
creative decisions should not be left with cultural arbiters."

Scharf says the industry needs to become more entrepreneurial,
and that includes the nurturing of newcomers.

"Smart producers will find the talent and the talent will come
to them. You need to have the next generation of exciting and
vibrant filmmakers, not people who can post an application, do a
good interview, tick the boxes, then wait six to eight weeks while
budgets are assessed. That's old-fashioned."

As a panellist of the low-budget DigiSPAA competition, he has
just watched 19 self-funded films that cost between $5000 and
$50,000, none of it public money. Some were very impressive, he
says.

At the same time, Scharf admits that he benefited from making a
funded short film, Lover Boy, which was also Romper
Stomper director Geoffrey Wright's first outing.

Antony Ginnane says the new funding regime  the fourth he
has worked under in his 30-plus years in the business  will
force producers to "engage with the international sector much more
than they did over the last 15 to 18 years".

The timing could be better. James Vernon, a finance broker
specialising in the screen business, told the conference that the
current financial climate would make it more difficult to secure
loans from banks.

In one of the few substantial interviews so far, Screen
Australia's chief Ruth Harley has indicated her intention to tackle
the issue of how Australian films connect  or do not 
with audiences.

Audiences are the key, Harley told Encore, "because if
there's no audience, where is the transfer of culture? When the
audience embraces a film there's a cultural transaction, so we need
more films that achieve that result."

One immediate effect of the offset, which unlike the old
direct-subsidy model allows producers to retain equity in their
films, is the incentive to cut out the middle man, the distributor,
and forge links directly with niche markets and cinemas.

That has been the case with the recent Men's Club, whose
producer and co-writer John L. Simpson was behind last year's
indie-film triumph, The Jammed, and Celebrity: Dominick
Dunne, whose producers Sue Maslin and Daryl Dellora have
broadened their producing activities into distribution.

Sue Murray, a long-time conference visitor and producer of
Richard Lowenstein's forthcoming Neil Neil Orange Peel,
noted in several sessions the crossover of people from different
parts of the industry.

However, many in the business are disappointed that Screen
Australia is yet to discuss how it intends to support film
marketing and distribution. They argue that a holistic approach to
industry support is required in this brave new environment of
multi-platforms and fracturing audiences, and fear that
insufficient money will be available once production support is
nutted out. Screen Australia will not confirm the precise
allocations of its various programs.

William Goldman's prophetic line about the screen trade 
nobody knows anything  gets a colourful working-over by Bryce
Menzies. Expletives deleted, he says that the business of making
films is arduous and frustrating, that the current distribution
model doesn't work, that the overseas market for Australian films
has collapsed and that even those familiar with the business often
have little idea of what's happening under their noses.

By way of example, his teenage son thinks that the scorned film
You and Your Stupid Mate, which Menzies executive produced,
is the best film ever made in this country. His only criticism is
that it is not stupid enough.

Underlying all the talk is the question everyone ponders but few
can answer: Which films are likely to succeed? John Collee, an
in-demand script doctor and writer whose credits include Happy
Feet and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the
World, which was directed by Australian Peter Weir, told a
packed room "there is no film that should not be attempted 
one of the things we should be doing is offering viewers things
they have not seen before".

For Collee, a philosophical message is the key to making a film
that audiences can latch onto. In Master and Commander, for
example, it's the question of what it takes to be a man in the 20th
century. In Pixar's famously popular films, it's all about adults
explaining the complexities of the world to children.

A scriptwriter today, says Collee, could be making a film about
the presence of a concentration camp in the middle of Australia at
the start of the 21st century (that would be the Woomera detention
centre) or even a vampire film set in contemporary Sydney ("love
vampire films, but they don't sell", quips Menzies when told of
Collee's recommendation). The latter, it turns out, is a script by
award-winning indigenous filmmaker Ivan Sen and one of the best
Collee has read of late.

Many emerged from that room energised and inspired by the
possibilities of filmmaking in Australia. Perhaps momentarily they
forgot the policy guidelines and deals and thought instead of the
final scene of the film Jerry Maguire, when the hero recalls
his guru's mantra: "I don't have all the answers. In life, I've
failed as much as I've succeeded. But I love my wife, I love life,
and I wish you my kind of success."